Hi all, I was looking for old posts, because I was sure that this must have been discussed before, but I could not find any.
When a package removal is requested, there is a bug filed against ftp.debian.org. Following procedures, the maintainer should also know about it (either filing it himself or being contacted about it). However, for other people browsing the BTS, and for orphaned packages, it would be much nicer if there was a bug filed against the package itself, or some remark on bugs.debian.org/package that its removal is requested. There could be several ways to achieve this. - Always file two bugs for removal, one against the package and the other one against ftp.debian.org. This requires no modification in any of the tools involved and could be recommended in the developers' reference. - The BTS is made aware of this, e.g. by having it possible to file a bug against two packages at once. Alternatively, there could be some special pseudo-header for bugs against ftp.debian.org. The second alternative is probably ugly and should be avoided. - The QA pages are made aware of this. This would probably require some standardized subject line like the bugs against wnpp have. One possibility would just be RFR (request for removal), maybe with some tags indicating which distribution would be affected. I like this solution but one disadvantage is that a request for removal of N packages would require filing N bugs. This would make things like #198449 a little more inconvenient. Probably there are other possibilities which I might have missed. The first question is, would other people find this useful? Lukas